Continuous delivery

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Continuous Delivery (CD) is a design practice used in software development to automate and improve the process of software delivery. Techniques such as automated testing, continuous integration and continuous deployment allow software to be developed to a high standard and easily packaged and deployed to test environments, resulting in the ability to rapidly, reliably and repeatedly push out enhancements and bug fixes to customers at low risk and with minimal manual overhead. The technique was one of the assumptions of extreme programming but at an enterprise level has developed into a discipline of its own, with job descriptions for roles such as "buildmaster" calling for CD skills as mandatory.

Principles

Continuous delivery treats the commonplace notion of a deployment pipeline[1] as a lean Poka-Yoke: a set of validations through which a piece of software must pass on its way to release. Code is compiled if necessary and then packaged by a build server every time a change is committed to a source control repository, then tested by a number of different techniques (possibly including manual testing) before it can be marked as releasable.

Developers used to a long cycle time may need to change their mindset when working in a CD environment. It is important to understand that any code commit may be released to customers at any point. Patterns such as feature toggles can be very useful for committing code early which is not yet ready for use by end users. Using NoSQL can eliminate the step of data migrations and schema changes, often manual steps or exceptions to a continuous delivery workflow.[2] Other useful techniques for developing code in isolation such as code branching are not obsolete in a CD world, but must be adapted to fit the principles of CD - for example, running multiple long-lived code branches can prove impractical, as a releasable artifact must be built early in the CD process from a single code branch if it is to pass through all phases of the pipeline.

Implementation and usage

Continuous Delivery has been implemented many different places, e.g: Sveriges Television.[3]

Further reading

  • Jez Humble & David Farley. Continuous delivery : reliable software releases through build, test, and deployment automation. ISBN 978-0-321-60191-9. 

References

  1. ↑ Jez Humble, Chris Read, Dan North (2006). "The Deployment Production Line". IEEE Computer Society. Proceedings of Agile 2006. 
  2. ↑ Kluge, Lars (12 September 2013). "Continuous Deployment with MongoDB at Kitchensurfing". slideshare.net. Retrieved 3 January 2014. 
  3. ↑ "On the Road to Continuous Delivery". 

External links


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike; additional terms may apply for the media files.